Get Even More GQ This Month

The Magnificent Louie Anderson

He's been a regular on the stand-up circuit, a scene-stealer in classic comedies, and the guy who shouted “Survey says!” on the imperishable daytime game show Family Feud. But it wasn't until Louis C.K. and Zach Galifianakis came calling for a surprising new role on Baskets that Louie Anderson's big moment finally arrived.

Backstage at a Chicago comedy club, Louie Anderson sits down on a tired black vinyl couch and begins to sink. Inch by inch, the sofa envelops him, like a python trying to swallow him whole. Purely from a getting-back-up standpoint, Anderson knows this is not good. “My knees are terrible,” he confides in the unmistakably flat midwestern voice for which he is famous. Anderson, who is 64, has been touring regularly for more than three decades. In a few minutes, during the second of his two Sunday-night shows, he will do a bit about his “Flintstone knees”—“just bone on bone on bone”—which hurt because “they're made for a smaller model.”

Many of his most quotable riffs focus on his weight, the soothing qualities of “a big slice of Cheddar,” or the way a hunk of deep-dish pizza he ate years ago somehow remains lodged in his colon, “like a tennis shoe in a dryer. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.” He gets big laughs with one-liners like “If I get one more X on my clothes, I'll be next year's Super Bowl.” But the bulk of his set these days is more ruminative, even essayistic. In certain shows, when the mood feels right, he includes a ten-minute bit on a fight he had with his father about butter that manages to touch on alcoholism, Donald Trump, and the human need for unconditional love.

“Sometimes when I do a show, the audience just wants jokes, and maybe that's what they paid for,” he tells me. “But I like the idea, I always have, of putting something in their pocket—something healing, loving, and informational.”

The audience often responds in kind. At one recent show, a woman presented him with a pair of purple-and-gold footies she knitted for him in honor of his beloved Minnesota Vikings. (“She said, ‘Louie, I don't know if you'd wear these?’ And I said, ‘Are you kidding me? I love them!’ ”) Another gave him two handkerchiefs she'd embroidered—one with his full name, Louie Perry Anderson, the other with “Mama Baskets,” a reference to his current role as Christine, the fierce matriarch on the FX comedy series Baskets.

The character, which is largely improvised, won him his first prime-time Emmy last year. Christine is based in part on Anderson's mother, Ora Zella Anderson, but those who tune in expecting merely a man in drag will have difficulty locating him. Sure, Christine Baskets wears bright, billowy caftans, big jewelry, and Crocs, but Anderson's portrayal is understated, focused more on Christine's interior life than on her eye-catching appearance. Her voice is only a half step above Anderson's normal speaking voice.

Not everyone who buys tickets to Anderson's stand-up gigs is familiar with his role on the sitcom, which was created by Louis C.K., writer-director Jonathan Krisel, and Zach Galifianakis, who stars as an aspiring rodeo clown. The folks I sit next to in Chicago—all in their 40s and 50s, all longtime fans of Anderson's stand-up—have not seen a single episode of the strangely sweet, surreal show. Out in the lobby, though, the Christine devotees are waiting.

An older lady approaches, her adult daughter by her side. Anderson, in what might be called his road uniform (white New Balance sneakers, a huge black T-shirt with Christine's face on it, a black suit jacket, and black trousers), greets them like they share a back fence. “How are you?” he bellows warmly, flashing his gap-toothed smile, and just like that, the woman's story comes bubbling up. “I've got Parkinson's, and my husband has pancreatic cancer. He just found out,” she says, starting to cry. When Anderson relives the moment with me, he gets teary, too. “She goes, ‘I see you—I see you—and you're real. And I need that,’ ” he says, pausing a beat (much like Christine would) before adding: “Everybody's lives are hard. It's why I do this. It's some kind of connection, you know?”

Until Baskets, no project has put Anderson's particular comic gifts—a mixture of observational realism and a sort of blunt-force empathy—on better display. More than once on set, cast and crew have been moved to tears by how Anderson's acting comes, as C.K. puts it, from “a place of real feeling. It all comes from him. He works with grace and inspiration under pressure.”

Anderson's decades of performing live explain some of this fearlessness, says C.K., but his openheartedness is what makes Baskets truly come together. “Show business is sometimes like this spotlight wandering around a prison yard,” C.K. says. “Once in a while it falls on you, and when it does, you'd better be ready. Boy, was Louie ready for this.”

In the late '80s, when Anderson was starring in comedy specials on HBO and Showtime and his career couldn't have been much hotter, he used to carry $1,000 on his person at all times—“just because I could.” He did a joke about it, explaining that packing an immense wad of cash calmed him down. “No matter how bad things get,” he'd say, “I've got a G in my pocket.” Even then, he understood the habit had less to do with swagger than with recovering from a childhood of abuse and poverty.

Those who have seen Anderson's act know all about how poor his family was. Their car battery was on its last cell; the electricity in their ramshackle duplex in the projects of St. Paul was often turned off for lack of payment; the kids' clothes were hand-me-downs or worse. Anderson was the 10th of 11 children; they lived in fear of their father, a former trumpeter for Hoagy Carmichael, who was an abusive drunk. Anderson's earliest memory is of hiding under the kitchen table as his dad hit his mom.

Ora Zella Anderson had a gift for making “the mundane magnificent,” Anderson says. She was particularly adept at unearthing treasures at the town dump. She'd bring home anything—broken extension cords, battered menorahs, an old butter churn—that she thought she could repurpose. The house was crammed with junk, though, Anderson jokes, “we weren't hoarders, because we had aisles.” Some clutter was necessary. “We had this old TV, 10 or 12 inches at the most, but it had no sound. It sat on a TV that had sound but no picture,” he says, before slipping into his mom's voice: “Beautiful cabinet, isn't it? I don't care if there isn't a picture. I love Motorola!”

Anderson was always fat—he does a painful riff about a salesman at the Big & Tall store who yelled, “I've got a Husky!” when the boy showed up to buy corduroys with vouchers his family received from public assistance. (“You never see any tall people at the Big & Tall,” he observes.) He was teased at school for his girth and berated at home as well, by his father.

At age 16, he dropped out of high school. A brief career as a fencer of stolen goods ended in his arrest, after which a probation officer persuaded him to finish school, and he spent three years working in a home for neglected and abused children. It was there that he discovered he had a gift for using humor to defuse tension. On a dare, in 1978, he performed for the first time at an open-mic night at a tiny club. Three years later, he won third place at the 1981 Midwest Comedy Competition, hosted by Henny Youngman. When Youngman handed over his plastic banana trophy, he whispered, “You were the best. You should have won.”

Youngman would soon hire Anderson to write jokes, and the younger comic moved to Los Angeles to hone his stand-up. From the beginning, he's said, his act was less about punch lines and “more presentational—a sort of ‘Join me in this’ storytelling.” Johnny Carson gave Anderson his national television debut in 1984. “I can't stay long, I'm in between meals,” he began, and stayed on the topic of his heft for nearly three minutes. Then, in a twist he's still proud of, he said, “People say, ‘Louie, why do you do those fat jokes?’ Because if I didn't, you guys would sit out there and go, ‘Do you think he knows he's that big?’ ” Carson loved him—he called him back out to take a second bow and strode across the podium to shake his hand. His friends at The Comedy Store threw him a party to celebrate his success, but Anderson's memory of that night includes this reality check: “A guy comes up to me and goes, ‘Are you Louie Anderson?’ And I go, ‘I am.’ And I put my hand out to meet him. And he goes, ‘I don't want to meet you. Could you move your car?’ ”

The next year, Anderson was cast as one of the leads in a TV pilot, Perfect Strangers, with Bronson Pinchot. When the show was picked up, however, Anderson was replaced. He went back on the road, co-starring with Roseanne Barr in a 45-city tour. (He's been a headliner in Las Vegas ever since, appearing everywhere from Bally's to Excalibur's Thunder from Down Under Showroom.) In 1987 he filled in for his friend Joan Rivers on her late-night talk show for a week: “At the end of that week I go, ‘I could never do this. The actors and actresses are too boring.’ ” That year he got a memorable role as Maurice, a worker at a fast-food restaurant who befriends Eddie Murphy, in Coming to America. Anderson made the most of the small part, playing Maurice as endearingly naive. But to hear how he got that job is to understand just how fish-out-of-water Anderson must have felt as a Minnesotan in Los Angeles. As he tells it, one day he was at The Ivy, an industry hangout that caters to those who want to see and be seen, when he saw Murphy eating with an entourage on the patio.

“We knew each other, because we're comics, and I said to my waiter, ‘Put Eddie's bill on my American Express, but don't tell him until after I leave.’ I think it was $661,” he says, making clear how humongous the tab was in 1987 dollars by squealing, “What?!” It would be the best money he ever spent. “Eddie called the next day and said, ‘I'm doing a movie. I have a little part that I want you to play.’ ” When I admire his pay-it-forward employment strategy, he corrects me, saying he was just being polite. “It was very midwestern. It was very who I am,” he says. “That's how I got most of my work: I was nice to people. And they were fans.”

Two days after his stand-up sets in Chicago, Anderson sits in a dressing room backstage at Steve Harvey's daytime talk show. This morning, he learned that Tony Sacca, a longtime Vegas entertainer, has died of a heart attack at 65. “Everybody's dying,” he says. “Part of me wants to go home and cancel everything else. I'm feeling worn-out. I do not want to die on the road in a hotel room.”

A pause as he ponders preferred places for his demise. “Maybe diving,” he says. He's referring to a mishap in 2013, when he was competing on the ABC reality show Splash and had to be rescued from the water. (“Louie Anderson Nearly Drowns in the Most Pathetic Way Possible,” ran one snarky headline.) In truth, he confesses, the show's producers had worried from the beginning whether he was healthy enough to compete. (He has struggled to remain under 400 pounds.) Only three of Anderson's ten siblings are still living; his baby brother, Tommy, died unexpectedly last February.

“The producers said, ‘You know, you could die.’ And I said, ‘What a way to go!’ ” he says, laughing. “But really, I did Splash because I wanted people to see how brave I was. I wanted to climb the rope in gym class that I could never climb. Put my initials up there. And I did it!”

Minutes later, Anderson takes the stage to huge applause and a slap on the back from Harvey. The two comics have more than a little in common—they both have done stand-up for more than three decades and, of course, there's Family Feud. (Harvey is the current host.) “Did you know I'm responsible for the $20,000?” Anderson asks, explaining that the prize money used to be just $10,000, split five ways; he urged the show to stop being so cheap and double it. “They wanted me out after that.” The two men compare stories about contestants' wackiest answers (Anderson: “Name a bird that flies.” “Uhhhhhh. Penguin?”; Harvey: “Name a winter-holiday month.” “October!”), and then Harvey plays a clip of Anderson, as Christine, delivering a pep talk to her son about turning his “whole life around.” When the clip ends, Anderson asks Harvey, “You ever put lipstick on?” Harvey's still laughing when he commands his audience, “Watch Baskets! Thursday nights at ten on FX!”

Anderson is friendly to every single person we meet. Over the course of our three days together in Chicago, I will see him befriend his limo driver (“What's up, Paul?”), ask his sign-language interpreter how she got into her line of work (“The whole thing is noble to me”), force $20 tips on hotel employees who are not supposed to accept them (“Just get a sandwich! Have a coffee on me!”), worry that one of Steve Harvey's behind-the-scenes staffers has a first name (Jorge) that got him teased as a kid (“But now you must love it!”), and tell a random woman in an elevator, “I love your hat.”

Krisel, who was one of the creators of Portlandia before he got involved with Baskets, says authentic warmth is the key to both Anderson's identity and the “Renaissance moment” he's having. “In Minnesota, there's a lot of chitchat, a lot of just talking to people at the store,” Krisel says, adding that this quality is pure Christine. “Louie's gifts are more suited to this smaller, more realistic performance. You look at Louie in that wig—he's got a feminine, cute face—and you buy it.”

Had Brenda Blethyn been available, Anderson might never have gotten the chance. Galifianakis, who plays two of Christine's sons—Chip, the aspiring clown, and his twin brother, Dale—initially wanted her for the role. “I liked the sadness in her voice,” he told me. Blethyn, however, was working on another project. So one day he, Krisel, and C.K. were spitballing other candidates, and Galifianakis mimicked the voice he imagined in his head. “You mean, like Louie Anderson?” C.K. asked. Exactly, said Galifianakis.

C.K.: I had met Louie a few times in stand-up clubs and he was always very nice and I really respected him as a comedian. We all had this feeling that this had to happen. So I got my manager to get Louie's number and I called him on speakerphone with Zach and Krisel in the room.

ANDERSON: I was in Vegas, driving to work. He goes, “Louie.” I go, “Louie.” Because you never get to say that! I'm “the other Louie.”

C.K.: I said, “I'm working on a pilot for Zach Galifianakis at FX. It's no money, but they're letting us do it our own way and it's fun and we have a part in it for you. We want you to play Zach's mother.” There was a pause as we heard the inside of Louie's car. You could hear that he was thinking about what I'd just said.

ANDERSON: He goes, “Will you do it?” And I go, “Yes, I will,” real loud. “Yes!” Just me in the car: “Yes!”

C.K.: We talked a little further and found that we both had the exact same take on it. I started to say, “We don't want you to do”—and he finished it: “Not like a character, right? Just me—my regular voice—but dressed as a woman.” He completely got what would be the best version of this.

ANDERSON: I mean, to be able to work with two of the hottest, most creative guys in comedy on, you know, a thousand-acre ranch of their own? I just did a little giggle and said, “Thanks.”

A few months later, they shot the pilot. The only time Anderson had ever worn women's clothes was when he was a small boy, and his five elder sisters used him as a dress-up doll. But from the moment he put on the page-boy wig and his first swipe of lipstick, he pursed his lips and felt at home as Christine. “I just went, ‘God, I look like my sisters and my mom, you know, all in one,’ ” he tells me.

“Any strong man has a feminine touch, and Louie has that,” Galifianakis says when I ask him about Anderson's performance. From the beginning, he says, Anderson killed in the role, becoming the “anchor” around which Baskets—recently renewed for a third season—floats. “Louie is sensitive. His comedy is a hug. It is not aggressive. And you feel that in his acting.”

What's most startling about Baskets is how consistently Christine's interior life outshines her outer trappings. Whether waging her perpetual battle to lose weight (in one remarkable scene, Anderson dons a red floral swimsuit and bravely wades into the ocean) or embarking on a romance with a sweet-hearted carpet salesman named Ken (in season two there was an on-screen kiss), Christine is at once fragile and courageous.

Like Anderson's mother, Christine is steadfast in her attempts to make the best of the seemingly limitless supply of bad situations the show throws her way. He thinks often of a favorite saying of his mom's: “Be nice to people, because you never know what kind of day they had.”

In a memoir he published in 2002, Anderson wrote about a time in his 40s when he got a gun, put it to his head, and seriously considered pulling the trigger. He was in debt at the time and was being blackmailed by a man who said the comic had propositioned him at a Southern California casino. Anderson says he ultimately put the gun down because he couldn't bear the idea of burdening the person who would find his body. “I would hate to find somebody,” he says. “I don't think I would survive it.” He performed a show a few hours later, and the crowd was so electric and appreciative that he realized he'd been a fool.

As for the incident in the casino, he doesn't deny flirting. “I was playing cards, and I'm a flirt, and I flirted with this person. I didn't do anything bad,” he says. (Anderson eventually called the FBI, and the guy went to prison.) I'm struck by his lack of bitterness against his blackmailer, whose allegations could have had devastating effects on Anderson's career. (A popular kids' TV show that he'd created was airing at the time.) When I ask him about it, he responds, “Forgiveness. I'm able to put myself in his position: ‘I'm poor, I'm a gambler, I'm offended by what happened, I'm going to make him pay.’ ” Later he'll tell me, “My nature is to let people off the hook because life is hard for everybody.”

Anderson describes his role on Baskets as having “just enough gunpowder to blast me into your consciousness,” and he's eager to keep the momentum going. He's developing a stage play, an animated show, and a one-hour drama series named after the street he grew up on. “Comedy is a big pot of stew that simmers. And you're in it,” he says.

In January, ten days before the second season of Baskets premiered, I saw Anderson perform at Largo, a comedy club in Los Angeles. Early in the set, he tells the story about his father and the butter. “All my friends are going, ‘I'm worried about Trump,’ ” he begins. Next comes a squeaky noise—“Meh!”—and then a pivot: “My dad bitched one time from midnight to 6 A.M. because I left the butter out.” A beat. “So I can handle Trump.”

But Trump is only a way station to a detailed portrait of the Anderson household circa 1963. Anderson acts out both sides of his father's withering interrogation of his butter-loving son:

The audience, which seems more like a Baskets crew than a Joan Rivers crew, is right there with him, laughing—and flinching—whenever he lets them. “When you emotionally dive into the crowd,” he's told me, “you want people to catch you,” and tonight it feels like they will. So he goes deeper. “I like soft butter,” he confesses. “I don't think butter should be kept in the freezing heart of the refrigerator. Have you ever ruined a piece of bread with a piece of hard butter? Trying to spread it?” He pantomimes the ruination—invisible knife on invisible bread—and screams, “Ahhhhhhh!”

Anderson is known for his nimbleness with what comics refer to as the “callback”—returning more than once to an idea in the same set, often when the audience least expects it. This show could be a callback master class. Over the next several minutes, Anderson toggles between his father's endless late-night inquisition (“Stop your blubbering!”), his own struggles with the tyranny of diet shakes and Exercycles, and the vastness of the potato-chip aisle at the supermarket. He also talks about his mother and her frequent attempts to comfort him with food.

During the making of the first season of Baskets, one of the assistant directors mentioned to Anderson that her mother was a huge fan. The comic responded: “You should call her.” The woman obeyed (for all his politeness, Anderson is insistent and not easily ignored), and when her mother later died unexpectedly, she told him she was so grateful. As thanks, the AD gave Anderson a brooch of her mom's to wear to the Emmys. “Always call your momma,” he tells me.

Onstage he admits, “I'm using everything my mom ever said” to play Christine, but he hasn't run out of material yet. Still, he jokes, for his next role, “I'm hoping to get a job as a man.”

Amy Wallace is a GQ correspondent.

This piece originally appeared in the June 2017 issue with the title "Gods of Comedy Louie Anderson."

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.